Perl 6 summary, 18-24 Mar, 2007

Thom Boyer responded to Damian Conway's post from November which
thanked people for offering feedback on the first draft. Thom said
that he had been unable to find the XHTML version of S26 and wondered
if it was available.

Jerry Gay replied that there wasn't a pod parser available yet.
Damian responded with the requested file, and said he still hoped
to finish the Pod6 parser but he wasn't sure when he would have time.

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
asked if Damian could post the code he currently has, so that others
could work on it.

Jonathan Lang proposed a module which would let you set a cycle for
enumerations. For instance, a 'seasons' enumeration might be defined
as 'spring, summer, autumn, winter' and incrementing summer would result
in winter. Andy Armstrong described enumeration as a simple state machine.

In ticket [perl #41871], James Keenan reported a failure he'd encountered
with make test. Later he reported that he had heard that this test was
supposed to fail, and suggested making it a TODO. chromatic said that
expected failures need to be marked as TODO, because volunteer time is
being wasted. Jonathan Worthington agreed.

Jerry Gay noted in ticket [perl #41878] that Allison Randal had
replaced the.IMPORT macro with the export_to namespace which
was defined in PDD21. However, the code was lacking safety checks
and he suggested creating an Exporter PMC.

Allison elaborated by
suggesting an interface. Patrick R. Michaud added his comments.
A discussion on importing followed, with Will Coleda also contributing.

Steven Pritchard remarked that he had been working on getting a package
built for Fedora, and shared his current package. Allison Randal
asked if he had kept track of the things which caused problems, so
that the packaging process could be improved.

chromatic speculated that installation paths which are not present
or are incorrect is a common problem. Allison agreed, and wondered if
some tests could be created to check for installation paths. Mike
Mattle explained some of the difficulties in doing this.
Joshua Isom thought that it would not too difficult.

Steven made a list of his three major problems: hardcoded 'lib',
LD_LIBRARY_PATH had to be set to blib/lib in the top directory,
and the languages/ files aren't automatically installed.

Earlier,
in ticket [perl #41168], Will Coleda added a request for a 'no
compiler found' error message in configure.pl.

A patch was supplied by chromatic, and applied by Paul Cochrane
in r17614. Paul asked for someone to check if it also worked on
Windows, because he had only been able to test it on Linux. Jerry
Gay confirmed that it worked.

Mike Mattie created ticket [perl #41889]. He thought he had seen
some duplication in src/library.c and so he attached a patch which
corrected it. He wasn't able to test it on Win32, however.

Jonathan Worthington noted that some of the code Mike thought was broken
worked. He also planned to apply the patch. Eventually this was done
as r17626.

Nicholas Clark had some comments on the algorithm involved, and some
questions about 2-letter drive names. There was some further discussion
on the temporary solution and the proposed final resolution of the
issue. Joshua Juran was also involved in the discussion.

Later, Mike posted another patch to src/library.c, meant to be
applied after the previous patch. This was ticket [perl #41900].
It was applied as r17628.

After this, Mike supplied a third and a fourth patch in [perl #41902]
and [perl #41903]. These were later replaced with [perl #41905].
Ticket [perl #41906] was also part of this series. Jerry Gay was able
to confirm that it works on Win32 and it was applied as r17630.

Paul Cochrane submitted the output of make test on FreeBSD 6.1.
chromatic had also seen a failure with t/stm/llqueue.t but considered
the other errors unexpected. He asked if Paul had GDBM installed.
Paul answered in the affirmative. This was covered in ticket
[perl #38764].

Mike Mattie described himself as a programmer interested in the Parrot
virtual machine. He found that one of his biggest obstacles to working
with Parrot is that it doesn't have a working install target. He explained
his reasoning and needs in depth.

Allison Randal replied that it was well-known that the install process
needs improvement, and patches and suggestions are welcome. She addressed
many of Mike's points, and welcomed proposals which may come from the
careful analysis Mike offered.

In ticket [perl #41896], Jerry Gay reported that in r17619 he
cannot run make test due to failures in the p5rx tests. He
suspected a string GC problem. chromatic thought this might
explain the STM test failure as well. Jerry replied that STM
tests are disabled on Windows so he cannot see if the problem
is related. He committed a fix in r17649.

Mike Mattie launched ticket [perl #41908] to offer a patch to
enhance Parrot_locate_runtime_str. It introduced two new
static functions. Mike went into some detail on his reasons behind
the patch. It was applied as r17632.

Earlier,
In ticket [perl #37178], Will Coleda applied a patch which quieted
some alignment warnings. Andy Dougherty had created it some time ago.
He hoped someone else would take up the task of trying to document
and check Parrot's alignment assumptions.
Later, the patch had to be removed because it had introduced some
problems. One problem was that it incorrectly assumed that all
compilers accept a -h, --help or/? switch. He and chromatic
tried to find a solution but were not successful; chromatic promised
to work on a better patch.

More recently, Andy Dougherty figured out part of the problem. Nicholas
Clark and chromatic also discussed the issue further.

In ticket [perl #38969], Paul Cochrane suggested removing
tools/dev/check_source_standards.pl because the tests which were
previously in the file had been moved to t/codingstd. Jerry
Gay directed Paul to [perl #39824].

Jerry Gay named some broken and possibly unused scripts in tools/dev,
many related to manifest generation. He wondered if one script
could replace them. Paul Cochrane linked this ticket ([perl #41915])
to another ticket, [perl #40911].

Matt Diephouse created a list of tickets that he wanted to see
resolved for release 0.4.11. As it just so happens, 0.4.11 was released
the day this summary was completed, so this message is not worth
summarizing.

Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch of an implementation of PIR in C in
ticket [perl #41955]. His goal was to clean up PIR and to see
if a rewrite would reduce the size.

Joshua Isom wondered what Klaas-Jan considered 'hackish' and how much
more work he thought it would take to get the bytecode working. Klaas-Jan
replied that he referred to the 'TODO', 'FIXME' and other comment
scattered throughout the code and that he couldn't make an estimate on
the bytecode although it probably wasn't trivial.

Allison Randal said that she was happy to see it in compilers/pir as
an experiment in progress.

Jonathan Worthington reported in ticket [perl #41956] that
it had been decided (in a discussion with Allison Randal) to rename
PMETHOD and PMINVOKE to PCCMETHOD and PCCINVOKE. Kevin Tew
wondered if PRETURN should become PCCRETURN.
Jonathan Worthington said he'd already created a ticket for that,
[perl #42001].

Andy Dougherty submitted a patch to remove// style comments because some
compilers don't understand them. Also, he thought it was a bad idea to
comment out sections of code without explaining why they were commented
out. H.Merijn Brand also expressed his distaste for this type of comment.

Matt Diephouse applied the patch in r17692. He said that there was a
test for C++ style comments, but that it doesn't appear to check all
generated code.

Andy Dougherty explained that hints need to come before inter/progs. He
submitted a patch to correct this. James E Keenan reported that Will
Coleda made the change Andy advised in r17671, which was basically
reverting to r16268 from a change made in r16416. He linked to information
about these previous commits.

chromatic wondered if there was some way that the problems James
referenced (which were on his system) could be fixed in some other
way. James and chromatic tried to resolve the issue. Andy added
his two cents.

Jesse Vincent announced the Perl 6 Microgrants program. Leon Brocard,
representing the Perl Foundation's grants committee, will work with
Jesse to select proposals for projects. Grants are for 500 USD. Proposals
should be for projects which can be completed in 4-6 calendar weeks.

Tim Bunce suggested that someone could create a tool which could parse
that Java files which define the JDBC API and generate Perl 6. He did
not want to submit the proposal himself, but hoped someone would take it
up. There were a few comments on this suggestion. Phil Crow had some
interest in the idea.

Paul Cochrane removed some code for MacOS Classic after few people showed
interest in targeting this operating system. chromatic rightly noted
that the code could be taken from subversion if it was needed at some point
in the future.

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